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Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

getspine.ai

31–40 of 85 posts

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#31

Super cool! I'm completely sold on the canvas layer. Embracing non linearity is such a boon when you're on the ideas stage. When you have verified it though, moving it to another medium (a document, presentation or just code) is often the best choice. Do you see the canvases created with Spine as "one off" that you discard when you have got your deliverable, or as something living that you keep around? I'm building a…

Thanks! Great question. We see canvases as living workspaces, you can revisit, iterate on, and build on them over time.

But the deliverables (docs, slides, code) are first-class outputs you can export and use independently. So it works both ways depending on the workflow.

Kavla looks cool, canvas-based SQL is a great use case for this kind of thinking!

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#32

I didn’t read the post, I checked out the website just like 99% of the people will do. Simple advice, if you are selling a product with a selling point of being visual, show it on your website. Not in a YouTube video but actual screenshots, short cut 10 sec video/gif

It's a shame the team don't have access to a product that would automatically research and implement what's needed on an AI product website.

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#33
Congrats on the launch! Meta comment, but I just ain't reading all of the above. You need to be able to explain this in about 20% the number of words or you'll lose people, especially VC.

My advice is to start with "Spine Swarm solves _____" then how, then why you're different. 3 short paragraphs, preferably 1-2 sentences each.

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#34
I think this is really neat. You should probably take it as a compliment that the biggest criticisms so far are about the website landing page. ;)

I like canvases in general, and I especially like them for mentally organizing and referring to this sort of broad work. (Honestly, I think zoomable canvases would make a better window manager in general, but I digress)

One small piece of friction: My default mouse-based ways of dragging the canvas around (that work in most canvases like Figma) aren't working. I saw that you had a tutorial, and I have learned to hold space now, but I prefer the "hold middle mouse button to drag my canvas view around".

I've got a couple of research tasks running now, and my current open questions as a very new user are: 1) How easy will it be to store the outputs into a Github repository. 2) How easy will it be to refer back to this later? 3) Can I build upon it manually or automatically? 4) Can I (securely) share it with someone else for them to see and build upon it? 5) Can I do something "locally" with it? Not necessarily the model, but my preferred interface for LLMs at this point is Claude Code. Could I have a Claude Code instance running in one of these boxes somehow? 6) What if I want to do private stuff with it and don't like the traffic going through Spine's servers? Could I pay them for the interface, but bring my own keys? (Related: Can I self host somehow?) 7) When this is done, each artifact it found (screenshot, webpage, etc), is going to be helpful. The data-hoarder in me wants to make sure I can search these later. Heck, if I could do that, this would become my preferred "web browser". (But again, I digress.)

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#36

Super cool! I'm completely sold on the canvas layer. Embracing non linearity is such a boon when you're on the ideas stage. When you have verified it though, moving it to another medium (a document, presentation or just code) is often the best choice. Do you see the canvases created with Spine as "one off" that you discard when you have got your deliverable, or as something living that you keep around? I'm building a…

Thanks! Great question. We see canvases as living workspaces, you can revisit, iterate on, and build on them over time. But the deliverables (docs, slides, code) are first-class outputs you can export and use independently. So it works both ways depending on the workflow. Kavla looks cool, canvas-based SQL is a great use case for this kind of thinking!

Nice! I'll make sure to try out Spine this weekend, if you want detailed feedback feel free to email me. You can find it in my profile.

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definite miss on our part, we're working on making the product experience more visible upfront on our landing page.

Friend, in the age of AI and even more so if you are selling an AI product, all you need is literally 2 screenshots and one prompt.

There is an inverse relationship between how obviously useful a product is and how easy it is to produce screenshots.

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#39
Calling it a 'canvas' makes me think that this tool is about AI agents doing some kind of collaborative drawing. Looking at the vid though, it seems more like an environment for visually organizing and managing agentic work (which seems very cool, and quite a bit more than just a canvas).

Re: Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas

#40
post #37

whoa congrats on the launch. lol I launched my visual canvas for agents today too. I went in a more of a collaborative canvas IDE, agent orchestration direction. But very cool to see your take on it https://getmesa.dev is mine

Rather than just finding a way to link your own product, why don't you do the rest of us favor and provide a comparison at least, so it becomes a tiny bit informative instead of just spammy?

Nothing wrong with sharing your own stuff, but at least contribute something back to the submission you're commenting on.

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